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Most boring toy

ThinkGeek was (is?) selling a 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith "action figure". A black block.

I think it is hilarious (like the Herbert Hoover Action Figure I once saw), but kids may be pretty bored with it (I doubt that kids are the target audience, anyway!)..... :)
 
I did not like my Etch a sketch, I could never draw anything with it.
Also I could not use a pogo stick my parents got me.
 
I could see the ATM being fun in a "let's pretend we are grownups" sort of way, like with kitchens and all. Less uses but as a part of something maybe.

Well, when the kids are opening up their restaurants and their customers don't have any cash, they can be directed to the ATM to pay their bills...because this is just a little mom and pop restaurant that doesn't accept credit cards.
 
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This, although I'm not sure its really a toy.
 
ThinkGeek was (is?) selling a 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith "action figure". A black block.

I think it is hilarious (like the Herbert Hoover Action Figure I once saw), but kids may be pretty bored with it (I doubt that kids are the target audience, anyway!)..... :)

Didn't they also sell an Invisible Man action figure that was basically an empty blister pack?

Also, most boring toy? jigsaw puzzles.
 
I've always enjoyed jigsaw puzzles especially as a child. We had dozens of them.
 
My favorite toys growing up were any stick that resembled a sword, a pile of dirt, the trees out back, matches, and of course my PlayMates USS Enterprise 1701-D
 
I never got the race car set. Or the air rifle or the walkie talkies or any of the wonderful items seemingly welded to the other gender. And I'm still mad.

Even the commercials discouraged me from asking for what I REALLY wanted, because none of it was "for girls." :( My mom was actually kind of sad when I told her about that when I got older.

But what she did get me that I got the most mileage out of were K'nex. I could build anything with those. Never mind how it looked--I could apply some imagination to fix that. ;) By the age I was when I got the K'nex set, I built my own custom "action figures" and "ships" for stories that lasted for days and weeks at a time. I went directly from the creative work it took to do that, to writing my first stories. So I'm very grateful for those boxes of K'nex. :)

I also give K'nex credit for truly marketing in a gender-neutral way, which unfortunately Lego gave up on a long time ago. (Compare this to what you see in modern Lego commercials.)
 
I guess it would have to be Etchiskech or Rubics Cube. The first had to be done by artists and the other I could only finish by prying it appart and and putting it back together!

About the fake atm. It reminds me of Monopoly. If the ATM was made into a game it would have kept kids attention. And a game doesn't have to teach kids how to steal their parents ATM card 10 years early. Chances are, the ATM will be replaced by something different by then.
 
See, I liked the Etch-A-Sketch, but then again, I ended up as an (amateur) "artist." The Rubiks Cube...frustrating as hell.
 
The only thing I could ever draw on my Etch-a-Sketch was a flight of stairs designed by drunk monkeys, but I loved it anyway. It's a great toy for people who are fidgets.
 
Jigsaw puzzles are the best! Still my favorite "toy."

I guess I was lucky as a child, because I don't remember having any boring toys. Or maybe I just don't remember them because I never played with them. Though, I don't remember having a lot of toys in general, mostly because I was a big reader, so friends/family naturally bought me books instead.

I was also lucky in that even though I am the first of several sisters (no boys born into the family at all actually, except one cousin, born before I was), my parents didn't care about what toys we were "supposed" to have as girls. Sure, people got us Barbies, but I also had a huge collection of Hot Wheels and Legos. And my personal favorite was the little plastic dinosaurs, which my neighbor and I collected and then turned his dirt-filled backyard into "Dinoland," complete with rivers and lakes (from the hose) and trees (weeds).
 
Electric football was very disappointing. It was also so loud that I basically got in trouble anytime I messed with it.

My favorites were action figures. The coolest ones were the Real Ghostbusters and the Incredible Crash Dummies. The Crash Dummies would blow apart when you pushed a button on their belt. It was easy to lose the pieces, but worth it.
 
It wasn't that my parents wouldn't have let me have "boy" toys like action figures and so on...it was because I got from the advertising very quickly that I was "not allowed" to ask. So they never even knew I was interested. :(
 
Electric football was very disappointing. It was also so loud that I basically got in trouble anytime I messed with it.

Barrel of Monkey's Game
It was probably more fun to twist and squeak the top of the container they came in and annoy people than to play with the toys

These were the two I was going to mention, as well. I wanted Electric Football so bad and was completely bored with it after the first few times playing it. This about sums up the inherent flaws of the game:

In Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir," the author describes electric football as "The worst toy of the decade, possibly the worst toy ever built...it took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man...it hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering."

As far as Barrel of Monkeys goes, there are supposed to be dozens of different ways to connect the monkeys, so much so that they're sometimes used to model viruses, but to a kid once you've connected together a few times they've outlived their usefulness.

As for more awesome toys/games, I loved to play Crossbows and Catapults. My friends and I had all the expansion packs and used to play that for hours.

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